DeAPIR: Efficient and Enhanced Dental Arch-Guided Panoramic Image Reconstruction from CBCT Data

Abstract

Dental CBCT and panoramic imaging play a pivotal role in dental diagnosis and treatment planning, alongside the indispensable use of computed tomography (CT) and X-ray imaging in dentistry, particularly for surgical planning. Given the widespread adoption of dental cone beam CT in clinics today, we explore a novel approach in this study—utilizing CT’s three-dimensional (3D) data to reconstruct a two-dimensional (2D) panoramic dental image. This method eliminates the requirement for an extra panoramic scan. In this work, we propose a novel framework to generate an enhanced and extended 2D panoramic view by using the dental arch extracted from 3D CBCT. Our method involves segmenting the patient’s dental arch from their 3D CBCT image by identifying horizontal slices with above-average intensity, followed by morphological operations, including dilation, Gaussian filtering, and skeletonization, to delineate the dental arch line. Additionally, we extend the dental arch beyond the wisdom teeth using quadratic curve fitting. Finally, we employ Maximum Intensity Projection on rotated cubic segments aligned with the dental arch curve to produce captivating panoramic images. The panoramic view produced using our proposed method, when compared to the results obtained from BlueSky and OpenInventor, exhibited superior enhancements and greater accuracy in panoramic visualization.